Expert Blog: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

On January 3, 2020, ICANN announced significant changes to the contract it has with Verisign, Inc. to operate the top-level domain .COM. ICANN and Verisign made these changes in secret, without consulting or incorporating feedback from the ICANN community or Internet users.

Although ICANN has a history of making similar deals behind closed doors, and also of ignoring unified opposition against such action, Namecheap will continue to lead the fight against price increases that will harm our customers and the Internet as a whole. (For more information about Namecheap’s efforts to maintain domain name price controls, visit pricecaps.org.)

The changes to the .COM agreement will have a much bigger impact on the Internet than the previous action for .ORG, .INFO, and .BIZ domains, due to the dominance of .COM. There are 359.8 million total domain names, of which 144 million are .COM – that’s 40% of all domain names. With 161.8 million country-specific TLDs (ccTLDs), there are 198 million generic TLDs (gTLDs). That means that .COM makes up 73% of all gTLD domain names.

ICANN was created in part to introduce competition between domain name registrars, but now ICANN itself is at the heart of the problem, without considering any input from Internet users on these critical decisions.”

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